Spindle reinvents local real-time search

Do you think you know everything there is to know about searching online? Yelp lets you search for merchants based on customer reviews, and Four Square keeps track of where you and your friends check in.

But if you want to search for a place to go to lunch an hour before you want to eat based, on which restaurant within walking distance is offering the best special that day, you’re out of luck. After all, Yelp and Four Square evaluate places based on old data.

But thanks to a new Boston-based service called Spindle, you can search based on what local merchants are pumping out in real time on Twitter and Facebook, according to a December 18 interview with Spindle chief executive officer, Pat Kinsel.

Mr. Kinsel told me that one of his friends, a beer lover, had a birthday on a Saturday. At the same time, a south Boston brewery was looking for feedback on its product. Mr. Kinsel’s friend and the brewery found each other using Spindle. The result was that the brewery delivered a case of its beer for free to his friend’s birthday party.

According to Mr. Kinsel, “Spindle harvests the social graph and leverages signals such as location and time of day, new technology that knows what’s happening around you and delivers you great content from local businesses and organizations, sorted by themes like restaurants, shopping, nightlife. Users can also share with their friends these updates from local businesses and organizations.”

Mr. Kinsel started the company in 2010 after a tenure at Microsoft, as did his co-founders. He was previously a project manager in its FUSE Labs, “responsible for incubating new concepts and bringing them to market.”

This was where he, ”Led development of Docs.com. Launched by Mark Zuckerberg at F8 in 2010, Docs.com was a collaboration between Microsoft and Facebook to bring Microsoft Office Online to the Facebook audience.” Prior to Docs.com, he built social applications within Microsoft Startup Labs and helped to bring Bing Social Search to market in October 2009.

Spindle launched its service in 2012, and currently has no paying customers. However, according to Mr. Kinsel, Spindle does have “250,000 accounts by 190,000 businesses and organizations in New York City, Boston, and San Francisco that share over 850,000 updates per week and are mentioned nearly 4.5 million times.”

Spindle’s goal is to boost the number of times a day that users check Spindle — based on their location, the time of day, and their expressed interest.

And while Mr. Kinsel declined to disclose Spindle’s user count, he is pleased that the ones he has are checking the service three to four times a day. Ultimately, he would like to reach sufficient scale and value to its users that Spindle could begin selling advertisements to merchants seeking to reach them.

Mr. Kinsel has company on his quest. Spindle has 12 people and has raised $2.3 million in total funding from Polaris Ventures, Greylock Partners, Lerer Ventures, SV Angel, Atlas Ventures, Broad Beach Ventures, Project 11, Ray Ozzie and Raman Narayanan.

Spindle is currently available in Boston, San Francisco, and New York. Moreover, Mr. Kinsel says “other major cities [are] soon to follow.” And he notes that his investors have been a big help in providing ideas on “how to expand Spindle’s footprint geographically and how to do it more quickly.”

Mr. Kinsel would also like Spindle to expand “category-by-category.” This would mean that Spindle would provide real-time search of “restaurants, community services, architects” and a variety of other categories of local businesses and organizations that target its users.

Can Spindle turn this idea into a business? I am definitely not sold on this idea, and would be inclined to pass if Mr. Kinsel asked me to invest. My biggest concern is that since the company has been around since 2010 it has had plenty of time by today’s consumer Internet standards to reach critical mass.

By that, I mean that if Spindle were going to have attracted a huge and growing base of users, it would have gotten there after two years. And it is only after it has achieved that size and growth that it can begin to think about how it would generate revenues.

In short, if I were an investor in this company, I would consider not investing anymore into the company or doing so only if a new CEO took over.

However, the people who have already bet $2.3 million ion Spindle are highly reputed. So if they’re right and I’m wrong, Spindle’s success will make its users, merchants, employees, and investors better off.